Make Your Translation Smarter

October 19, 2017 Nima Henry

Translation can be a complex process. However, the market isn’t going to wait for you. In fact, it can be cold and merciless. But, as they say, the most successful businesses are the ones that rise up to the challenge. There are solutions that can always help your business carry out translation projects faster than ever while still retaining quality and avoiding over-expenditure.

The first step is to actually make the process itself more efficient. This increase in efficiency tends to get passed onto other areas as well. So, how can you make your process more efficient? Well, you achieve efficiency by making your translation process smarter.

Here is how it’s done.

Automate

Marketers today are expected to create a voluminous amount of content and the demands only keep increasing. Fresh collateral is always required in order to carry out functions such as search discovery. The demand also stems from the fact that content marketing has grown to become extremely popular.

The gist of all this is that content needs to be created in large amounts. Now, if we were to add translation to this, you can be sure that the time required is going to increase drastically. In fact, each language you aim to translate will require almost double the time of the actual content creation process.

Needless to say, manual processing in such a scenario can prove to be counterproductive. The only solution is to automate.

Automation can be achieved with an agile translation management system. The system imports fresh content and delivers it back to the content system. On the whole, you benefit from an interference-free process. Additionally, the scope for error is reduced as well.

Other than that, such a system can keep you updated about the status of each project and even permit collaboration in real time. This can end up saving all the minutes and seconds that are spent on trivial tasks.

Establish a Style Guide

Do not settle for a case-by-case approach. This is a very time-consuming process. The ideal solution would be to establish a style guide. Style guides, for translation, are basically a set of brand preferences and rules that translators can refer to when working.

Style guides can tell translators whether a brand uses an informal communication style or a more formal one. The idea is to prevent the chaos that usually arises in situations where translators are unaware of the parameters set by a brand/client.

Style guides also contribute to a higher quality of work as they eliminate second-guessing.

Look at Your Data

Finally, look at your data if you want to know where time can be saved. Unfortunately, in a manual translation environment, this can turn out to be a time-consuming task as data aggregation can be very challenging.

However, in an automated translation environment, aggregating data can be automated and analyzed. The analysis can provide you with insights on why certain deliveries are taking more time, why some content takes longer to translate, or which of your translators is slower than the rest etc.

The insights gained can help you identify problem areas and fix them. You now have the information to increase productivity and boost turnaround time; projects can be delivered sooner than ever.

However, make sure that the translation management system does not own your data. A lot of providers have clauses that provide them with ownership of your data, which means you can end up compromising on aspects such as real-time access and transparency.

Data ownership is something you need to be watchful of when selecting a translation management system that makes your translation process smarter.